


I'll Be Looking at the Moon (But I'll Be Seeing You)

by hopeless_eccentric



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Femslash February, Femslash February 2021, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Kissing, Whump, i PROMISE there is a happy ending you have my word, just being extra safe, the graphic depiction of violence is a bit gratutitous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29346555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: When Buddy saw Vespa now, she would greet her with a smile and a kiss to the hand, if she was feeling like making Vespa blush and chuckle and call her any affectionate assortment of joking insults. Buddy had long since learned that “sap” and “I love you” were not so different. She did not greet Vespa with a pit in her stomach and the knowledge that the sight of her face at the end of the dream-conjured bridge would be the catalyst for another aching night and another cold, bereft morning.Luck, however, was a fickle friend. It was bedmates with fortune, and it often seemed the two of them were inseparable. Especially when they decided to leave.
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa Ilkay
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19
Collections: The Penumbra Podcast Femslash February 2021!





	I'll Be Looking at the Moon (But I'll Be Seeing You)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all!! Bit heavier, but I PROMISE there is a happy ending they deserve it. you have my word
> 
> Content warnings for discussion of grief/mourning, injury, blood, fatalism (it is assumed a character who lives is not going to do so), mention of surgery, implied anxiety attack, mentioned gun violence, burns

For nearly two decades, Vespa Ilkay’s face had been clearest in Buddy’s dreams. Memories were always red and purple, as if mental pain had rightfully bludgeoned those moments that ached so much more potently in her absence. Buddy had slept side by side with her lover, though the moment the radiation-red dawn pierced through her bedroom window, Vespa left, her faithful haunting over until Buddy somehow managed to fall asleep once more.

Every day, Buddy thanked her lucky stars, however many of those uncaring things there were left, that she no longer had to sink into sleep to see Vespa again. When she laid her gaze upon Vespa, her eyes found flesh and bone and the same crooked smile she had fallen in love with at knifepoint all those years ago. She was especially thankful that her only accurate images of Vespa Ilkay were not ones scarred by her gasps of pain and the distant whoosh of a lifetime lost to a two hundred story building.

When she saw Vespa now, she would greet her with a smile and a kiss to the hand, if she was feeling like making Vespa blush and chuckle and call her any affectionate assortment of joking insults. Buddy had long since learned that “sap” and “I love you” were not so different. She did not greet Vespa with a pit in her stomach and the knowledge that the sight of her face at the end of the dream-conjured bridge would be the catalyst for another aching night and another cold, bereft morning.

Luck, however, was a fickle friend. It was bedmates with fortune, and it often seemed the two of them were inseparable. Especially when they decided to leave.

If Buddy had more sense, she would have wrapped her arms around Vespa’s waist and started dragging her towards the exit, where Jet and the Ruby 7 awaited the two of them. However, Buddy’s sense had dropped dead the moment that bolt of jaundiced green light split the air in twain. Any hope for revival crumbled the moment Vespa cried out, the sound pushed past her lungs, as if the force of her back hitting the floor had caused it, rather than the seizing of a kill bolt driving through her side.

“Bud,” Vespa started as a croak, one weak hand doing its best to bat away Buddy’s reaching arms as the thundering of pursuing feet grew ever louder, seemingly strengthened by the acrid stench of blistering flesh in the air, “you’ve gotta get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere, darling,” Buddy returned, doing her damndest to keep her voice steady, even with the strain required to drag the both of them behind a wall and set her own blaster to kill.

“We can’t lose the doctor and the captain,” Vespa protested.

“Exactly,” Buddy replied, the worry wringing its hands in her stomach replaced by a stab of guilt that was all too aware that she was counting down words between the two of them. She had no time to be curt just to save face. “My intention is that neither of us will die.”

“I was shot, Bud.”

“That didn’t stop you before,” Buddy swallowed.

“That was twenty—” Vespa broke off with a gasp, her lovely, ice-gray eyes shielded behind squeezed eyelids, still haunted by the remains of her eyeliner from their date night mere days before.

“Don’t exert yourself, darling,” Buddy insisted, remembering the firmness in her tone when she turned to her comms. “Juno, darling, how adept are you at arranging an extraction?”

“I think I could—”

“Wonderful,” Buddy broke him off. “Do so immediately.”

Buddy shut off her comms with a stifled noise. Which emotion had coaxed it past her lips she did not know, though she didn’t doubt it had something to do with whatever beast was pacing along the lines of her ribs, jumping between the urge to hold Vespa tight and weep into her chest as if that simple act of fairytale adoration could spare her life and the urge to turn away from their hiding spot until she saw exactly which shade of red every single one of the pursuing guards bled. 

She tried her best to push the thought away, but it was persistent, fueled only by Vespa’s attempt at stifling a groan.

“Shh,” Buddy started. “Don’t hurt yourself, darling.”

“What’s the point?” Vespa hissed. “It’s bad, there’s no way Steel’s getting in here in time, and I don’t have my stupid first aid kit.”

“Vespa, you musn’t—“

“What if this is it, Bud?” Vespa sputtered. “Isn’t this what we always wanted? Some goddamn blaze of glory, just to be scraped off the floor whenever the security guards come to take the trash out.”

“Please,” Buddy broke her off before her voice could crack any worse. “My darling, I seldom ask this favor of you, but I think it would be ideal for the both of us if you did your best not to talk so much.”

“Might not have a lot of words left, Bud,” Vespa sighed. The cold, newborn glint of terror in her eyes wilted just as fast as it had bloomed. Buddy found the bitter affection streaked across her face like bloodstain almost worse. “Sue me if you like, but I wanna use them on you.”

“Vespa, I—”

Buddy was broken off by the sudden urge to breathe. Vespa shushed her gently, a hand coming to rest on her face. Even if it was trembling, Buddy found a certain amount of solace in the touch of a single thumb making a gentle pilgrimage upon her cheekbone.

“You shouldn’t be comforting me,” Buddy realized, though when she reached to catch Vespa by the wrist, Vespa took that hand in her own bloodstained one and squeezed it, bringing it close to the center of the heaving chest that had come to rest across Buddy’s lap.

“Five things you can see,” Vespa murmured.

Buddy stilled what she was beginning to realize had been a heaving breath. She squeezed her eyes shut, though not for long, knowing well she wouldn’t have much time to memorize the face of Vespa Ilkay before she would be reduced to a haunting midnight lover once again.

“You, my darling,” Buddy began, trying in vain to keep her voice even as it began to splinter. “Those sharp, lovely eyes of yours. Your smile, even through all of this. My hair, which you did this morning. Your blood on my hand.”

“Don’t focus on that,” Vespa pressed. “Keep breathing, Bud.”

“Vespa, you really shouldn’t—”

“My vitals are stabilizing,” Vespa joked mirthlessly. “One way or another.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I don’t like lying to you, Bud,” Vespa swallowed, choking back another pained noise before forcing her words out once more. “Four things you can touch.”

“Juno’s almost here, darling, I just need you to hang on for me—”

“Four things you can touch,” Vespa insisted.

Buddy swallowed, trying her best to pry her mind from the bloodied elephants in the room. Her gown, clinging to her thigh with Vespa’s blood. Vespa’s breathing, getting weaker and weaker every time her chest rose underneath Buddy’s hand. The floor shaking with footsteps as the guards searched for them. Hopelessness tearing into her chest with animal desperation.

“Your hand,” she started instead.

“Good.”

“Your thumb on my cheek,” Buddy continued. “Your head in my lap. The floor underneath us.”

“Three things you can hear,” Vespa choked out, the words mangled between gritted teeth as she stifled another gasp. 

“My darling, is now really the time to be talking so much?” Buddy hushed her, doing her best to replace the panic in her voice with comfort. When her mutinous vocal cords would not obey her, she squeezed Vespa’s hand instead, as if in the force of their contact, she could make up for every year the two of them would miss.

“Buddy,” Vespa started with a huff. “I’m not gonna be around to hurt much longer, but you are. I’m—I’m trying to do something for you, one last time. I need you to just let me help you.”

“We’ve just been married,” Buddy protested, as if the scrap of metal around her fourth finger would mean anything in the face of Fate.

“I don’t think the guy who shot me cared.”

“I don’t want to die in a blaze of glory,” Buddy pressed. “You can’t die right here, not after we were apart for so long.”

“It’s been a good year,” Vespa swallowed. “Best in a while, actually.”

“And it won’t be your last,” Buddy insisted.

Vespa merely grimaced.

“Three things you can hear, Bud.”

“You, breathing,” Buddy finally managed once some cold catalyst within her chest snapped. “The oxygen regulator running. The sound—”

Somehow, amidst the choking smell of Vespa’s injury and the burning terror of her eyes beginning to droop, Buddy managed a smile.

“The sound of the Ruby 7’s engine,” she pressed forwards, giving Vespa a slight shake and trying in earnest to keep her grin alive, as if that would lessen any of the injury her wife had just sustained. “Juno’s footsteps. That has to be him, nobody else would be running so quickly in this direction.”

“Or that loudly,” Vespa tried to laugh, though it came out a fragile croak instead, buried into Buddy’s chest where she had attempted to drag herself upright. This had failed, however, leaving her to heave for breath into Buddy’s shoulder while Buddy ran a gentle hand up and down the curve of her spine, applying the simple, memorized motion of comfort like a balm upon a minor injury.

“He’s almost here, my darling,” Buddy assured her. “Just a matter of moments.”

“Bud,” Vespa managed, some other thought lost on her lips as she let the word hang in the air. “I love you, have I told you that recently?”

“Not recently enough,” Buddy tried to chuckle.

“I oughta. Don’t know if I’ll get the chance to again.”

“Don’t say such things, darling, there’s plenty of—” Buddy’s words turned to ash on her lips as Vespa went limp in her arms.

By the time the both of them had been extracted from the building, Vespa carted off to the medbay and Buddy left to pace outside the door while Jet applied the best of his first aid knowledge, she could not seem to pry her mind off of the memory of touch, as if the moment in which she had cradled Vespa and told her honey-tinged falsities of hope had been burned into her skin somehow. She didn’t doubt it was a punishment of sorts for letting her composure fall astray while Vespa’s hands clung to her face, rather than to strings of her own life.

It was foolish, she knew, to feel responsible. However, the human mind was, by nature, an incredibly foolish thing. Buddy had learned to live with that reality long ago.

However much she showered or changed or tried to pace the sensation away, she could not alter the tacky feeling of blood soaking into her dress and sticking to her skin, as if even this part of Vespa was trying to cling to her in one way or another. She could not shake the memory of Vespa’s trembling thumb trying to anoint her cheek one last time. She most certainly could not pry the weight of Vespa’s head off her lap. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to.

These various ghosts still mocked her as she paced the hall, only dragged from her haunting when the door to the medbay slid open and Jet gestured wordlessly for her to enter.

“She will not be awake for some time,” Jet began, prying his gloves off and tucking one inside the other before disposing of them. “However, for now, she is in stable condition. I thought you would like to know this fact as soon as it became clear.”

“Thank you, Jet,” Buddy nodded, doing her best to keep relief from flooding her throat and rendering her voice utterly useless.

Jet did not question when Buddy took a seat at Vespa’s bedside, nor when she took her by the hand and kissed it just a few inches away from her IV, as if the sensation might be passed through her bloodstream and into her heart.

Buddy did not ask how long it would be until Vespa awoke. She had waited far too many years in the lighthouse for a few hours to weigh on her conscience.

When Vespa finally did shift, it was to try and fail to sit bolt upright, for the effort was rendered useless by the bandages wrapping around her waist and the likely jolt she felt at jostling her injury.

“Vespa,” Buddy started, jumping out of a state of half-sleep to sit on the mattress at her wife’s side and use one ginger hand to press her back into the mattress, “do be gentle with yourself, darling.”

“Bud?” She croaked.

“I’m right here,” Buddy returned. “You’re in the medbay. Jet saw to your injury, and I’ve been keeping an eye on you through the night.”

“Oh,” Vespa breathed, glancing down the too-wide neck of her paisley blue medical gown to inspect the bandages around her waist, “so that’s why it’s a decent job.”

“Vespa,” Buddy chuckled, coming out just a little too high and a little too reedy, for the panic of hours earlier had refused to part from her entirely, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

Vespa didn’t seem to have a response for that, merely squeezing Buddy’s hand, as if in apology for all the chances they had missed when wasting their time counting moments in backwards moving numbers.

“Will you—” Vespa cleared her throat, nodding towards the mattress. “It gets cold in here.”

“Oh, Vespa, of course,” Buddy replied all too quickly, already climbing under the covers at Vespa’s side before her wife could so much as finish her gesticulation.

However, Buddy did not make the first move to hold her wife, her hands held back by a great and trembling fear that anywhere she laid them would cause pain. In wordless recognition of this fact, Vespa wrapped her arms around Buddy’s waist to pull her close.

Buddy couldn’t complain with the position, for this way, she could feel every single beat of that determined little organ that beat away beneath her lover’s breast.

“I’m right here,” Vespa reminded her, albeit slurred with exhaustion and pain medication.

Buddy didn’t reply, merely kissing her adorations into the top of Vespa’s head, just as if they were holding each other close in their own bed, anointed by the gentle light of passing stars as they came to pay homage to Buddy and Vespa, Vespa and Buddy.

There were no stars in the sky visible outside the medbay. However, a moon was in the process of passing by, reflecting a gentle silver light onto the both of them.

Buddy had heard enough of sunlit lovers to consider the trope overdone. However, even if her eyes bore dark circles and her hair had been mussed up by sleep, the moonlight seemed blessed for having fallen upon Vespa Ilkay.

She wasn’t entirely sure how to put this into words, for her tongue had been tied, too focused on the sensation of Vespa’s heart beating away against her own to worry about poetry in such a time. Buddy likely wouldn’t remember to tell Vespa such a thing. Instead, she did her best to worship the message into Vespa’s lips.

Buddy knew there was no way Vespa could have known word for word all those things Buddy seemed, for once, entirely unable to say. That didn’t change the fact that she smiled in the gentle, silvered grayscale from the window, and she did so as if Buddy had loosed every one of those words into the space between them with utmost eloquence.

Buddy wasn’t able to appreciate that smile for long before Vespa kissed her again. However, she certainly couldn’t complain. She would much rather treasure the muscle memory of Vespa’s lips than cling onto her ghost from afar.

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY ENDING JUST LIKE I TOLD YA HOW BOUT THAT
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! Make sure to SMASH that kudos button and leave a comment down below or ill make sweet sweet love to your mother
> 
> Check me out on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric or on twitter @withane22 !!


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